Today, an increasing number of readily deployable wireless transceiver devices (e.g., femtocell and picocell base stations), operating on licensed frequency spectra, are being utilized by network subscribers within the coverage areas of larger wireless network cells (e.g., macrocell and microcell base stations) to improve the quality and/or capacity of wireless communications for various subscriber site locations. Smaller cells play an increasingly significant role in reducing metropolitan and residential area traffic experienced by larger, often overburdened, network cells. These transceiver devices may be distributed in such a way as to provide short-range wireless communications services to single-family homes, public businesses (e.g., such as Starbucks® coffee shops or McDonalds® restaurants), to particular floors within an office building, or any other public or private entity location desiring improved and/or localized cellular service.
As would be understood by those skilled in the Art, in wireless service provider networks, macrocells typically provide the largest wireless coverage area for licensed frequency spectra, followed by microcells, then picocells, and lastly femtocells, which provide the smallest coverage area of the common network cell types. By way of example, in a typical wireless data communications network, a macrocell base station may provide a wireless coverage area ranging between one to five kilometers, radially from the center of the cell; a microcell base station may provide a coverage area ranging between one-half to one kilometer radially; a picocell base station may provide a coverage area ranging between 100 to 500 meters radially; and a femtocell base station may provide a coverage area of less than 100 meters radially. Each of these network cell or base station types is generally configured to connect with a particular service provider network using various common wireline communications technologies, including, but not limited to: fiber optic, DSL, powerline, and/or coaxial cable (joining cells to a backhaul network).
It is anticipated that with the evolution of next generation wireless communications (e.g., with 4G wireless communications deployment), smaller cells (also referred to herein as “transceiver devices”) may eventually be the predominant service providing instruments utilized in most heavily populated geographic regions of a wireless network. In this developing scenario, groups of smaller cells may be collectively viewed as “layers” of cells that supply the lion's share of a particular service provider's network capacity, whereas the network's larger cells may be primarily responsible for providing overarching coverage to the underlying intra-network of smaller cells, in order to facilitate service continuity between smaller cells and amongst cells and cell layers. For example, as a mobile subscriber geographically moves amongst various network sectors, an overarching macrocell may be responsible for filling in any service gaps existing between and amongst various regional microcells, picocells and femtocells that may temporarily provide regional communications service to the travelling mobile subscriber.
Expanding modern network resources may include introducing many layers of smaller cells in highly populated regions of an existing network. This can reduce periods of network congestion created by necessarily bottle-necking a majority of regional subscriber communications through a small number of larger network cells (e.g., macrocells or microcells). This congestion reducing technique can improve a service provider network's Quality of Service (QOS) as well as network service subscribers' collective Quality of Experience (QOE) within a particular portion of a data communications network. Negative effects associated with poor QOS and poor QOE (e.g., conditions largely caused by congestion and/or interference), which can be mitigated by adding a substantial number of short-range wireless transceiver devices to network infrastructure, may include: queuing delay, data loss, as well as blocking of new and existing network connections for certain network subscribers.
In traditional networks, where larger cells (e.g., macrocells or microcells) provide communications service to a majority of regional network subscribers, subscriber devices (also referred to herein as “user equipment”) may be provided with a listing of all registered neighboring cells by a network service provider via communications with a larger cell. When subscriber devices are not in an active communications session (e.g., in idle mode), the subscriber device may be instructed to scan for all neighbor cells on the listing in their local area, such that the larger cell and/or a regional service provider controller can perform a service assignment and/or handover selections based on detected neighbor cells (e.g., cells in the service provider listing) that may be available to provide service to the subscriber device. In these traditional networks, larger cell planning consists of utilizing a grid where representative cells are placed, such that the network cells have common coverage boundaries with their neighboring cells. The number of neighbor cells for a given cell area is generally a fairly low number. The network infrastructure for many modern networks has been constructed utilizing this type of network planning scenario. As such, adding many new smaller cells to existing network topologies introduces new levels of complexity to wireless networks that were never anticipated in the original planning and deployment stages for many existing larger network cells.
As one example, with the addition of numerous smaller cells (e.g., picocells and femtocells) in a modern network (e.g., a 3GPP LTE network) there are likely to be many new cells added within the coverage areas of preexisting macrocells. As such, traditional macrocell based reselection mechanisms become very inefficient for proactively moving traffic off of a macrocell layer and on to smaller cell layers. Relying on neighbor cell lists to largely determine neighboring base station locations for network planning is not sufficient to provide a user equipment with adequate information for locating all available cells in their local area capable of providing communications service to them. There may be a significant number of residual neighboring cells in the region that are not on any service provider listing due to modern trends of ad-hoc smaller cell deployments by many network subscribers. Additionally, these residual cells may be too numerous for a user equipment to practically scan for and inform a regional macrocell or controller device about. It may take the user equipment an inordinate amount of time to scan through a lengthy list of cells and to scan for newly deployed cells (e.g., cells positioned via ad-hoc deployment) in order to allow a service provider entity to determine and assign a new, preferred serving cell for the user equipment.
Conversely, smaller cells with service provider listings of neighbor cells often have few cells on their respective neighbor listings, due to the fact that the majority of their neighbor cells typically only include a couple larger cells and a handful of smaller cells. Additionally, their smaller cell neighbors may be dynamically changing as local subscribers deploy residential or business site base stations in their area without necessarily registering their mobile cell location with their local service provider. In this scenario, service provider managed listings or regional base stations may be impractical to maintain and they may become obsolete as smaller cells are rapidly being deployed to support the increasing network bandwidth needs of network subscribers. Current mechanisms for service reselection are biased towards larger cells and away from smaller cells since subscriber mobility tends to more easily move connections to larger network layers.
Accordingly, as multi-layered networks (networks layered with many smaller cells) are rapidly being deployed to facilitate next generation wireless communications, there is an increasing need for improved systems and methods that facilitate a reassignment of the traditional task of detecting available intra-network resources for particular user equipment away from the actual user equipment and towards distributed, local service provider resources. This could effectively reduce, or eliminate altogether, the impractical burden on user equipment of needing to scan for all local service provider cells within their present geographic area capable of providing them with service. It would also efficiently shift various service handover tasks to network cells with previously untapped resources. As a result, wireless networks could achieve improved network QOS metrics and a network's collective users would benefit from improved QOE. It would also be beneficial if distributed service provider resources, employing these robust new systems and methods (e.g., smaller network cells), could autonomously function to detect and measure local user equipment communications. In this way, larger network cells and/or controllers could be relieved from having to collaborate with less reliable user equipment to procure regionally available network resource information.